To: marty@ebay.com Subject: late arriving comebacks Marty, I ran into the perfect comeback today, 14 weeks late. Life is like that. H.G. Wells: ... it is the universal weakness of mankind that what we are given to administer we presently imagine we own. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Huge digression cause I'm bored out of my mind; it will make you laugh, it will make you scream in pain, it will insult and astonish and infuriate you, it may be used in evidence at your trial, and if you take a cold shower once in a while, come back and look at it from the viewpoint of a "clues for improving business processes at eBay and elsewhere MBA student from Titan", it is possibly laden with them, but look carefully who claims so, the delete key is just an accidental finger twitch away. You have just begun a 600 line journey, across a 12 hour brutalization of American English as captured in ASCII, do you care to continue? -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- As you're partially aware I have no intention of meeting Paul Kilmartin face to face while employed at eBay[*]. The origin of the problem was a request to one of his subordinates, name forgotten, we'll call him "M", early in my second week here, to choose my own email and login userid, xanthian, for my own reasons, later documented here. [ http://www.well.com/user/xanthian/why_xanthian.html ] When asked by "M" to elaborate what I was requesting and why, I elaborated that I wished to continue to use at eBay the same userid I'd used in my last five jobs and over half a dozen other sites over 12 years, xanthian, and a bunch of perceived benefits to me and to eBay. It's a senseless except to the individual involved, huge self esteem and self concept thing: * do I control my own name, locally and in the world beyond, or is it dictated to me by powers beyond my control and to whom I am compelled in durance vile to submit? * am I valued enough by my new employer that they will treat me as a person in an issue of trivial effort to them and nonexistent consequence except to me? * I'm more than a little eccentric; are eccentrics tolerated at this new place? * partially outside my choice, mostly because of it, I will be spending most of my life in a virtual reality from which I return to celebrate that strange concept traded for money called working hours, money I can send my wife to keep her calm and plump; will that wash here? and more of the same, looming just that important to a person who lives in the virtual world as much as I do. [I frankly, when not too focused on the issue, think of the things I do and have done there as things done by this very real, just impalpable, alter ego named xanthian. Schizophrenia runs in the family, mine is one of the milder cases.] This in lesser detail I had freely admitted in the elaboration requested. This is the only place I ever remember even being asked to explain the request, it was usually simply granted, sometimes with some incredible convolutions to make it serve my uses without breaking other stuff, other places more easily because that was normal practice anyway: user gets first pick, default if no preference expressed. I had sent the elaboration as requested, (and complied in my usual verbose style, to a tell me more response, which style you've come to know and dread). "M", still not understanding something among what to do, why to do it, how to do it, how I dared ask for it, or his right to do something outside the box, forwarded my request, both original and elaboration as one, to his boss. I next received from someone I'd never heard of, and to the extent of perhaps three printed pages, a blast of managerial arrogance insufferable to a stone statue, received from him not in response to me, but to email forwarded to him by a "baffled at the concepts contained" subordinate. I thought I'd sent a request satisfiable without any added effort and at incredibly small cost and potentially large benefit even to eBay[**]. Mr. Kilmartin vehemently denied this: the world of eBay computer operation would fall to dust, starting at his desk, among the lesser consequences of complying, and I was to blame; paraphrased from within his some three pages of email abuse heaping from a total stranger to a total stranger as the recipient's first noticable example of ebay management style. This was at or before Friday afternoon of my second and second full work week. [As an added bit of humor the end result on the unix boxes was account kdolan password xanthian, a password actually sent back to me in email to multiple recipients. With that eBay password security mindset example, I haven't bothered to change it, it is easy enough to remember, and apparently no one cares how easy it is to guess, and it _still_ hasn't expired.] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- momentary break in rant because I logged on here and got diverted from my 20 minute task by a fortune cookie; Kostya was my intended mail target, and a few other diversions after logging on and it is nearly lunch and I meant to catch the 6 AM train to my room. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The entire quote reads: "The lawgiver, of all beings, most owes the law allegiance. He of all men should behave as though the law compelled him. But it is the universal weakness of mankind that what we are given to administer we presently imagine we own." -- H.G. Wells It was my ISP login fortune cookie today. Since you run into far more of this kind of grief on my behalf than should be anyone's share in life, I thought this small piece of solace to me could also be a minor bit of repayment to you. Cheers! xanthian. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- rants need annotation and documentation to be official: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [*] Besides flat refusal, I invoke Dilbert's Law in my defense: always avoid meetings with time wasting morons. [**] My pontifications as xanthian carry a surprisingly large amount of weight on Usenet. I recently explained to someone why his posting an incredibly ugly (to a font person) web page http://www.masterstech-home.com/ASLDict.html as a "rebuke to Netscape" for an HTML 4.0 boo-boo in handling the (I'm guessing here a bit, no, takes thirty seconds to look it up) "←" spellout that is supposed to be displayed as the left arrow character, was not just a mistake, but a violation of Usenet usage, custom, law, and an insult to (in some cases the memories of) some incredibly hard working people. He was new, young, sure his kindergarden acquired understanding of human social interaction not only would but did hold on the net. The discussion went on at calmer and calmer levels off and on for a week. Toward the end, short on meds, sleep, and recent family contact, I was sitting here tears pouring down my face in uncontrolled grief at a loss hard to justify to a non-melancholic, explaining why this quote exists among my randomly chosen siggie quotes (and would be understood at a glance by anyone who had been on the net more than casually from before it turned into the web): "Ha!" said God, "I've got Jon Postel!" "Yes," said the Devil, "but *I've* got all the sysadmins!" -- Matthew Skala -- mskala@ansuz.sooke.bc.ca -- http://www.islandnet.com/~mskala/ explaining why this tidbit credited (RFC 1762 in not quite these words) to a [TRANS:2} by a Jon(athan B.) Postel: "be conservative in what you send and be liberal in what you accept" was one of the only two universal Usenet rules that had let it become the Web and take over the world [the other one, "give back more than what you take (and don't mention it)", he embodied as if a deliberately created atavar, but I don't know who first wrote down the thought, I do know in its written form it predates Usenet's grand reorganization] so embedded in the community thinking as to be cited or paraphrased in design documents as inherently obvious, and usually without attribution like "let there be light": an infoseek search using: +url:sunsite.auc.dk/RFC/rfc/ | conservative in what you send returns from the 3000 RFCs at least 83 real possibilities among 2705 total, and the first four returned at least all do contain it as a guiding design principle. RFC 1123 RFC 1413 RFC 1716 RFC 1726 The tears schtick finally carried the day, and as his idea of a compromise he created http://lexis.di.fct.unl.pt/ADaLIB/conservative_index.htm and then pointed out to me this link from that page to some software he also mentioned to the net: http://lexis.di.fct.unl.pt/ADaLIB/be_conservative.adb Software containing in part: -- be_conservative.ads -- by Mario Amado Alves -- 2000-09-15: created and tested in 15 minutes -- in honor of Kent Paul Dolan -- This procedure transforms HTML character references outside Latin 1 -- into more conservative code, e.g. "←" to "<-" (currently the -- only transformation!) I told him his brain was fried, the proper honor cite was: -- in memory of Jonathan B. Postel, long may his spirit guide the net: -- "be conservative in what you send and be liberal in what you accept" you honor the author, not the reporter bringing the text to your attention, but as of a couple minutes ago it stands as shown. The local moral if any, is that a good smart skilled kid, cocky and equivalent to a dangerous armed lunatic near real software with real work to do in the real world, is now a chastened, less cocky young man who might in time come to be thought of among his more thoughtful friends as embodying rule two. [I understand you did this for Kostya, it is probably easier face to face, for most people, if you have better face to face skills. My face to face example was easier, the kid was legally blind, over 25 years my junior, minority, high genius level, and in danger of becoming the first jailed computer hacker. That's my friend Kyle Jones, founding postmaster at UUNET in his second job (I drove him to the interview for his first one, and to find an apartment within walking distance a bit later that week, and then got lotos of email for a while about the miseries of OS/400 in doing standard communications protocols) and now quietly known as a world class sendmail guru too young to quit working and too nice to gloat unless you push him. He's 31-34, but I can't be sure just which, I get time bindings pretty confused since I started taking psychotropic meds. I don't give up just because it is harder for me using email, I just work at it longer if not interrupted and not discourged.] This is one of hundreds or perhaps thousands of cites of me a web search might find, though knowing all the (mostly insulting) names I've been called would help increase the catch. Knowing that some of the hugest early insulters are now coming to me for help, or just quietly supporting stuff I suggested back then, is kind of harder to document. The larger lesson is that I've had impacts sometimes directly, more often indirectly, on a lot of people who run or ran or will run the web, more that will help do so, continue to do so. When someone says to someone elses suggestion, "but Kent said", and hears back "who's Kent", it would be nice if the easy answer that pops to mind were, "you know, xanthian@ebay.com, the guy who [ acted as, authored, blended, blundered thus inspiring, cares for the resource, co-authored, coerced, combined, conceptualized, contributed to, converses with, convinced, defended, designed, devastated, discovered, drove off, exiled, forced into bankruptcy, founded, funded, gave us the term, got rid of the mail account of, inspired, invented, is derided in, is listed in, is the authority for questions about, lends credance to, maintains, nagged us into, organized, pointed out the fallacy of, prevented, protected, proved, provides, provoked, ranted thus inspiring, refocused, reminds us regularly, rescued, sidetracked, sparked, supports, tested, ]" (there isn't anything on that list I can find with merely one possible continuation known among well informed netters, one is over a hundred, one is several thousand but neither would be likely to be known that way to the conversants), because then it would reflect "eBay" [usually favorably, and a couple of those that look unfavorable wouldn't be, in context, but then "say anything about me as long as you spell my name right" applies to dragging in first looks for free anyway] in the hearer's mind too. Thus ends the "let's change the past" hypothetical discussion of why blowing me off in such a fashion might not have been in his employer's best interest, given out of the box thinking capability and management skills exceeding a top notch turnip. Reality intrudes. With my current userid courtesy of Mr. Kilmartin, the answer is certainly going to contain "xanthian@", usually "xanthian@well.com", though many others are known and at least two others still worked the last time I checked, but not conceivably "kdolan@ebay.com"; though it is in the signature of almost every net article I post, it doesn't carry the baggage of history the way the ones starting "xanthian" do. Nobody including my mother and my drill master ever heard me called kdolan. The list of living people who have heard me called or called me "Lucy" on a regular basis (it'll come to you) is much, much longer, surely over 200, maybe over 300. My wife only sends me email here if the house is actually flooding and the phone is shorted out, my kids never do. My brother tried, once, after being warned not to, he's now on email abuse probation as jcdsr@aol.com. Long story. When I tell people "email me and I'll find out and let you know to whom to talk about [usually] jobs here", the address I give them for me is not at ebay.com, when I email them the same, the email I send is not sent from ebay.com. They aren't really thinking "that nice guy at eBay", they're looking at a contact address at a place called the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, and might be inspired to check the site home web page there, to see why that nice guy hangs out at such a place. The late arriving comeback is nice, but revenge served cold and effortlessly is still a favorite of mine. Another of my favorite quotes, this one from an LDS Apostle, Neal A. Maxwell: "want the consequences of what you want", wasn't meant to add savor to revenge, but to prevent its necessity up front. The word isn't yet out all that well, however. It surely hasn't reached Paul Kilmartin. Aside from the usual fact that I felt like venting, the possibility of requesting that people learn from their mistakes is non-existent, but the chance of being overheard remarking that they might can occasionally accomplish the same thing. If by any chance we do decide to hire a postmaster of appropriate class, or better two, for reasons I discussed in other email you saw, employing Kyle Jones as kjones@ebay.com is giving away free money compared to hiring him as kyle@ebay.com or kyle.jones@ebay.com. Hiring Terry Lambert as tlambert@ebay.com probably won't work at all, terry@ebay.com is worth big bucks besides the fact that you wouldn't insult a very proud accomplished but touchy man, terry.lambert@ebay.com would work, but in his community he's "terry, the email must _work_ man" or "terry, the guy who contributed the threads fair process timeslice sharing mechanisms to the FreeBSD kernel" or probably several other's I don't know myself. Terry isn't precisely famous for his surrenders to expediency, either, but at eBay such a person would look really good heading up a lot of crucial projects: The upshot is: When the specification to which you refer conflicts with RFCs, the RFCs win. This is a fundamental philosophical view: interoperability is a hard requirement, period. Giving the customer something which meets specification, but fails to operate is not an allowed option. -- Terry Lambert Explanatory digression: He was speaking in response to the wimpy Tech VP's willingness to let the UI manager insist on human complexity issues that stuff necessary to make email work in a web appliance because the RFCs required that the stuff be under local control was too complex to expose to a computer naive web appliance buyer who by buying it became the email admin. The DEV manager, lacking the kind of support from above that Terry was giving from below, gave up his management role and went to work as a developer for the UI manager. I was the email internals dev person, brought in without a quick aside on my chances of lasting in the job long enough to get a first bonus there, and the reason I don't work there any more is that the task of accomplishing the "technically simple but politically impossible before I arrived" needed email control exposures to the end user couldn't be done and couldn't be made possible to be done from below. I was the third person in that chair in nine months, survivor Terry had changed projects, to one with no UI, my immediate predecessor walked off on short notice, and among the remaining email team, us we had lots of ideas, demos, redesigns, a couple of quick hack bugfix workarounds to problems caused by the missing UI exposure, but no deliverables from my spot. With the IBM buyout, a few months after the UI manager went AWOL and I began reporting to the Tech VP directly, who just expected me to show up at meetings, nod and smile a lot, he was getting extremely rich and planning his exit and didn't like to listen to adults quarrel, much less choose winners on technical issues he didn't understand in the first place, IBM in its infinite wisdom at killing what it claims to love, brought in a hotshot no longer needed elsewhere (he had just headed up (with great success in the sense that nothing went wrong) maybe 1500 IBMers doing their Y2K preparation and death-watch, now had 8 folks reporting to him). He didn't understand the politics, or the small business startup ways of getting from A to B. ( Just to prove I'm not as dumb as I act, it goes like this. You close the bodies in a room with a lot of whiteboards, notepads, abundant alkaloid laden beverages, sugar based snacks, trays of undercooked meat, initially unsoggy but onion and hot pepper dense sandwich fixings, impossible to chew buns, oversauced hot foods. All present scream and slash whiteboards, running forth and back between them, drawing with *their* marker color, until some weakling takes a bathroom break. The strong form a quorum, quickly vote one blazingly unlogical except to Blind Stupid Johnson(sm Terry Pratchett) choice out of the design. Iterate until the catered food is being licked off the trays, and the windows are beginning to have outsides again. The token type B personality, unnoticed until now except for the spouting of eraser cruft, reveals a beautiful set of notes on paper, cleverly provided with tear points matching participant's job skills. Theories soft spoken among the white noise protection of the prototype fans are this is either Dilbert's garbage person[tm]; the night janitor, somebody Schimmelhorn[tm]; some flatfooted venture capitalist with a hovering problem, might have been McDuck[tm]; or the long rumored mythical beast, SeeEeeOoh. We notice this person off and on in the halls and may say "Hi" once a day, but we don't maintain eye contact, and no one can come up for sure with a name, first or last; just "hi", and "thanks", and "could you pass the salt". All walk away with a working prototype design with the worst bogosities burned out. Nobody had to lose face by losing to someones face, Everyone has a piece of the workload in hand, accompanied with a sense of ownership, They all smile like participants in a particularly successful group therapy session, which it was. Modulo type B, who never seems to show up for the nerf rocket duels, all remain really good friends able to do useful work at amazing rates. Lather rince, repeat. [The "mature software development shop" usual mainstays of "schedule slack, manhours, delivery dates, milestones, our next regularly scheduled meeting will be" don't seem to be mentioned.] ) He wasn't a manager who cared to learn them, certainly wasn't going to contribute to solving them (I may have asked for such help at every weekly status meeting we had) by doing anything undignified to a manager of his stature and seniority within IBM, though memos flew to "solve Kent's problems" but a fellow who managed by objectives and Microsoft Project, as was respectable and appropriate in a well managed respected software and hardware giant like IBM. My lack of checkins was hurting his schedule compliance. I think I lasted nine weeks from his arrival, (and him about six more, from later reports from friends left behind), before I was told I wasn't working out and handed a bit over $12,000 by the perpetually cheerful Tech VP, to choose to go away on my own. In and around this I contributed a lot at higher level to trying to keep that place afloat and pointed in some discernable direction, to feel like I was earning my pay in some fashion. The IBM Executive VP replacement CEO to whom we all reported, a tenderhearted cheerleader type, (Our startup founder, a personally nice guy with a great "we don't play mind games here, we're all upfront and forward focused, my door is always open, and 'I am the queen of Rumania'" new employee getting to know you speech, doing the wrap on his third starup, none ever IPOed, all buyouts where you lie to the workerbees from the start about who is going to do the work and who is going to walk away with the bulk of the loot, whose real identifiable startup skill was making VCs feel warm and fuzzy on the golf course, he had ice blue eyes, sun blonded hair, and an excellent tan, was still physically present though he'd gone through several interesting sounding status changes reported in cheerful memos), and sat at his nice desk in his nice office doing whatever his most recent title implied whenever aboard (usually writing more cheerful memos), until just before I left, There is a ritual among gentlepersons about ushering the inconveniently temporarily necessary old crew at the top out when a buyout happens, and he was a well rehearsed particpant.) lasted in total a year before he announced, probably toward the middle of this quarter would work out, in email my strange habit of sending on campus mail from off campus had left me able to receive initiating in a separate "back at White Plains personal mailing list" that retained my name and thus reached me either directly through my well account or a .forward alias xanthian@whistle.com until at least his departure again from IBM, "email list security, not just a good idea, a survival requirement" a previously unmentioned intention to "just get us going really good, and then go back to founding and running 'his own' company, his real heart's love" a job from which he, a person hurt to the point of choking back tears when inadvertantly insulted by an aussie with the face to face vocal tact of an emailing xanthian at a company meeting, Even I, face to face, can tell before the third try that I am asking a person a question which their life experience has not prepared them with the skills to understand or the brass to buffalo through; it was something like this. "Great, but we have real and pressing techincal and human interface issues, right now, which IBM by taking over and ignoring by diverting all management attention from, for what, seven months, already is failing, right now, at using Whistle as its prybar to open the mysterious small business market, is going to pay by introducing into the 'great small business market' as you indicate you intend, a new product with a new service instead of hardware revenue model, but based on and containing exactly the immediate and pressing problems needing management solutions that will let us install technical solutions, right now, but which are going to continue to fail, just in front of a larger audience beginning almost immediately, and what specific things are you doing right now to make this stop happening beginning now?" had just escaped back to IBM to be the head of the new Global Small Business division focused around us a year earlier. End of explanatory digression. I don't mean to suggest that a corporate process improvement of getting all you can in the way of free good will when you hire notorious people is actually achievable, of course, just that it is conceivable. I guess in all fairness, I cannot leave you without this last bit of hubris, so you don't feel like you are the only person in recorded history ever to receive such a document. "I just wanted to call everyones attention to this particularly agonizing and downright Kentish work of grammatical convolution. (I have no brain...)" -- hamlet@chopin.udel.edu (Chris Adams)